A story about senior military officials who sought to cover their tracks and allowed more junior leaders to take the fall for the mission’s outcome - including an Army officer who was back in the United States with his wife while his baby daughter was being born. A story about families who say they were deeply misled by Army officials and lied to on a number of occasions. A story of soldiers who followed orders from senior officers who were continents away, after concerns about the mission’s safety voiced by the commander on the ground were overruled.

“3212: UN-REDACTED,” the culmination of years of investigative reporting by ABC News’ James Gordon Meek, pieces together a story that’s entirely at odds with the Pentagon’s version of events of what happened that day in Tongo Tongo. And now, more than three years after that May 2018 briefing at the Pentagon, the families know the truth. They felt in their gut that what they were hearing wasn’t correct. “Basically what they said was the team leader lied in the brief that he submitted to higher about the mission.” Dustin Wright’s father, said in the documentary. “From the beginning, everything was negative about the team,” Arnold Wright, Staff Sgt. AFRICOM briefing on the Tongo Tongo, Niger ambush:Įlsewhere across the country that day, outside of that briefing room at the Pentagon, family members of the four fallen soldiers watched as Waldhauser and Cloutier described their loved ones as inadequately prepared soldiers who had essentially gone rogue on an unauthorized mission to capture an ISIS target. The actions of the soldiers of ODA 3212, Waldhauser claimed, were “not indicative” of the “fantastic job” U.S. The soldiers of Operational Detachment-Alpha 3212 had not completed “basic social-level routine tasks” ahead of the mission, Waldhauser said, adding that they “inaccurately portrayed” the intent of a mission they carried out the day before the ambush. Instead, the blame was laid at the feet of the special operators themselves.

The problems weren’t with AFRICOM, officials claimed, or even with the chain of command that oversaw an operation that placed American soldiers in a situation where they had little to no support and were vastly outnumbered by enemy militants. Roger Cloutier - laid out a list of problems the investigation had found. But that sense of ownership quickly dissipated as the official who carried out the investigation - Waldhauser’s own chief of staff, Maj. Africa Command, stated in his opening remarks that he took “ownership for all the events connected to the ambush.” The “responsibility is mine,” he said. While speaking to the press at the Pentagon on May 10, 2018, Marine Corps Gen. LaDavid Johnson, 25, of Miami Gardens, Fla.

Us army green beret arma 3